Pirating, us and the future.

If you want more food for thought, maybe you should watch the movies called RIP: A remix manifesto or Steal this movie!


Saw, it - definitely a manifesto, but as a source of info I found it poorly researched both in depth and bias, riddled with factual errors and used manipulative presentation - (understandable, it is a manifesto)

To be honest, while reading your post (which also had a number of factual errors, though I believe this is directly from the source material, not your own innate misunderstanding or negligence) it felt very much like a recitation of the popular IP manifestos.
I think that's one big problem, people start and often end their legal understanding with political position pieces and never bother to study the jurisprudence of it.
 
I have seen steal this movie. The other not.

I am wondering now...how politically aware of things the average person here is. Maybe we should start a thread about it. I know its drummer world...but...certain things I have read here make me want to ask questions to younger cats.

Maybe thats a mistake haha. Still curious.
 
I have seen steal this movie. The other not.

I am wondering now...how politically aware of things the average person here is. Maybe we should start a thread about it. I know its drummer world...but...certain things I have read here make me want to ask questions to younger cats.

Maybe thats a mistake haha. Still curious.

Please don't. Politics and politicians are even worse than the music/entertainment industry.
 
I have seen steal this movie. The other not.

I am wondering now...how politically aware of things the average person here is. Maybe we should start a thread about it. I know its drummer world...but...certain things I have read here make me want to ask questions to younger cats.

Maybe thats a mistake haha. Still curious.

probably not very fruitful, wayyyy too much distortion in the data - for starters you are looking for a self-eval of a self-selecting sample

Even the question "how politically aware" might not be all that well defined -- does "aware" require one to be "informed"? Is someone who does not follow issues b/c of a view that there is a more basic problem of democratic disenfranchisement considered more or less or differently "poltically aware" in the question?
 
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Please don't. Politics and politicians are even worse than the music/entertainment industry.

+1.
i don't mind answering questions, but i can't be bothered to have a 'discussion' about politics.. it's so disillusioning.
i dont think one persons opinion will make any difference, so i don't really bother with it.
 
let me rephrase. What i mean is the awareness of Zeitgeist for example. I see a few posts about the music industry and how things function. Business vs music etc.
The discussion here seems to lead to the larger picture of money and what is going on socially. In reading a lot about all this on many other forums now maaaybe...we can come to a general sense of how we feel on both ends of the spectrum.
 
I have seen steal this movie. The other not.

I am wondering now...how politically aware of things the average person here is. Maybe we should start a thread about it. I know its drummer world...but...certain things I have read here make me want to ask questions to younger cats.

I think distinctions could be made, but between "younger" and "older"? I don't think opinions are so easily distinguished.
 
let me rephrase. What i mean is the awareness of Zeitgeist for example. I see a few posts about the music industry and how things function. Business vs music etc.
The discussion here seems to lead to the larger picture of money and what is going on socially. In reading a lot about all this on many other forums now maaaybe...we can come to a general sense of how we feel on both ends of the spectrum.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080214225254AAEWJ2e

top answer. i've seen zeitgeist. some of it seemed ok, but some of it was terribly sourced..

like i said, i don't really want to talk about politics, i'd like to stay away from religion too. maybe some day we'll all rally together and take down the machine.
maybe if we did it would be good, maybe if we did it would just happen all over again. i don't really have enough time to think about it, because thinking means hours of research, obviously.

as for business vs music, i like to try to combine the two.
 
One thing I will say is this: The number of downloads are not an accurate representation of what your sales could have been. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that most of the people that downloaded the DVD would not have purchased it in the first place. Most likely, they just saw it and thought "Well, it's free so I might as well check it out". I have no doubt that were probably a few people (albeit a very small percentage of that 40,000 that you mentioned) who saw your DVD, but didn't want to pay for it (or couldn't afford to pay for it), so they went and downloaded it instead.

So, with that said, look at it like this: With those 40,000+ downloads, sure you may have lost out on some sales, but not a huge amount. Don't think of each download as a sale lost. Instead, 40,000+ people have seen your DVD and what you have to offer, so you are building a fan base and a support base. This comes back to the age-old argument of whether or not piracy isn't all bad for the industry, as creates interest and exposes people to things they never would have seen had they not had quick, easy, and free access to it.
 
Yeah...we covered those points already. But my numbers dont reflect any benefit from people doing that. I think...I feel...it has been purely..laziness...short sightedness...and maybe even misdirected anger that made this happen. Most of the students that have downloaded my dvd that I have talked to IN PERSON (in the hundreds) did not realize i would be shocked until they met me. This is a problem of the culture. In the case of bands and pop music ...you are right. And the backlash is justified toward the labels for producing such tripe. In the case of Jazz, or instructional products and a few other things...its not cool.

Those are my feelings. I dont need promotion like a band does. I dont feel that the dvd has caused me to have more fans. What "fan" base has been created has been from a slow steady stream of playing and touring etc etc. Maybe more people know about me because of it. But it has not turned into people buying the dvd any more or less. Or any other stuff I have. I guess that is what a "fan" does, buys other stuff of yours. I dont think educational stuff works that way. The cats that do buy my stuff are genuinely interested in what I do. And are serious about learning. They write to me personally and thank me for making the DVD. There has been a lot of that! And I am very grateful.
I see tons of other books ready to be downloaded from educators that are well established. I talked to them . It does not make them happy that people are taking the stuff.

I guess at this point i would venture to ask people to think twice before downloading Instructional stuff, or Jazz...things that have NOT been produced with the thought of gouging people or promoting inane values or culture. I would say as musicians we are Ambassadors of culture. We have influence on culture. And contrary to the bitter feelings that people are not trustworthy and we will not come together and sing songs together....(haha) I believe the opposite. I think if people are made aware of some things, that they will adjust their behavior.
NOT everyone!! But a lot! I have Chinese friends and students. And Russian as well. (Those are the countries doing most of the damage). They are nice people. Call me Naive.
Also I have proof that people can change! All it takes is communication and a lot of patience. But we dont talk about it...it just goes on and on.
PM
 
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To be honest, while reading your post (which also had a number of factual errors, though I believe this is directly from the source material, not your own innate misunderstanding or negligence) it felt very much like a recitation of the popular IP manifestos.
I think that's one big problem, people start and often end their legal understanding with political position pieces and never bother to study the jurisprudence of it.

Factual Errors?

202020202020202020202020202020
 
It is easy to complain. I know, I do it often.

But look at the upside of this technology, look at the glass 1/2 full for just a moment:

30 years ago, you would have never even have been able to make a drumming tape. The technology didn't exist.

20 years, drum videos were coming out, but they were expensive to make, there were only 2 distributors, and if you wanted anyone to know about them, you would have to hope one of the two distributors helped you make your tape, or at least picked you up. Ads in Modern Drummer were the only real advertisement.

Now with modern technology, good cameras and video editing software is common place enough to make it possible to make a DVD without spending a fortune. You can set up a web page to advertise, and post sample clips to youtube, and use online social networking to get the word out that said DVD exists.

The same technology that is stealing your hard work is the same technology that allows most people to even have any clue as to who you are and want to buy your DVD.

No, that doesn't make the stealing any less wrong, or the pain of watching dollars go down the drain, but on the upside, you got to do it, people dig it, and 20 years from now, people will still get to watch it (one of my favorite drumming tapes from when I was a teen is out of print and was never released on DVD)

Every good thing in life generally comes with some sort of unintended consequences, opportunity costs or other downsides.

For as much as I lament about the lack of live gigs and the lack of real drums in music these days, I'd also gladly eat my arm to have had today's technology 15 years years ago. I was in a band, and we worked really hard. Most of us had gone to MI, we rehearsed 3 times a week, and gigged often. We had every record label in LA showing interest. But eventually, we took it as far as we could, and that was that. Looking back, I have little to show for it, because recording was still expensive, and doing a video was out of the question without a mega budget, so I have little to document that period of my life. If that band existed today, with the amount of work we put into it, we'd have an album on itunes, we'd have videos on Youtube, and we'd be able to parlay that into gigs all over the place rather than just LA. I have no doubt we would have at minimum developed one heck of a cult following, if not more. I'd gladly trade 1/2 our sales to illegal downloads to have the the 1/2 of sales that could have happened had we had the technological opportunities we have today.

More recently, last band didn't turn a profit, but using myspace and youtube, I know we sold copies of our album from Japan to the Netherlands, all without leaving Southern California, or doing a faction of the work my prior band had to do. That's a pretty cool feeling. Maybe we lost a lot of sales to illegal downloading, I don't really know. But I do know I would have never been able to make that album or get anyone to know it existed if the internet didn't exist. We even made music videos!! And the only cost was the $89 I spent on editing software.

So what is the future? Well, the future may not hold albums and DVDs that we can sell without piracy, but it does the opportunity to do what ever you want to do musically, and put it out there and find like minded people who might dig it, even they live on the other side of the planet.
 
No I mean you should name the factual errors...

...was I wrong that Bach or Mozart didn't have any sound recording equipment in their age?

A really glaringly fundamental one is


Imagine if someone copyrighted the drug cure to AIDS or skin cancer, imagine all the disadvantaged people who can't afford but need the drug to cure them of the disease.

In the 1980s, US law allowed life forms to be copyrighted.


wrong area of law
inventions are not subject to copyright law, they are subject to patent law, different law altogether, different terms, scope, procedure, etc, etc

While RIP! correctly identifies inventions as patentable, the movie does misdescribe them as, IIRC "corporate secrets guarded like gold'' -- patents aren't secret at all (those would be trade secrets), they are published! and even the preferred embodiment is supposed to be published
One problem is the filmmaker uses a researcher (DJ Girl Talk), not a patent atty as his patent expert - now in USA (other countries have similar restrictions), patent law is the only federally certified specialty in law ( even your regular atty can't practice before the USPTO - it's a separate bar exam and you have to be an engineer) and one of the big reasons we have the Fed circuit court of appeals is to address patent law (the other big reason is [non-IP] international law) -patents go to the fed circuit (not the regional circuits) . When girl talk says "they could sit on it forever" - he is factually incorrect

If you sample from one song and don't pay royalties to the artists (or rather media company) that owns the song, you doing something illegal


That's not necessarilly true. The holder of a copyright can give license without payment, there are even situations where non-permissive use can happen such as parody (a type of - and it's a term that gets misused and overused - fair use ) as in Campbell v Acuff-Rose, the owner may even choose not to exercise the right of restriction or waive certain rights such as reserve the right of distribution, but allow the creation of derivative works --the CC organization was formed to help make these sorts conditional or limited reservation easily identifiable/user friendly, but it's not new legal mechanism.

The originial intention of copyright law was to encourage creativity by letting the artist make money, but now it has gone the other way, creativity is restricted and copyright law is basically geared to benefit the rich few.


This is a bit of a more nuanced one and depends on how far back we go for "originally".
The Statute of Anne was, primarily, financial but not for the artist, it was a publisher's not creator's protection.
Now if we look to something like the US constitution we have 'To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;' -- Notice there is no restriction of 'by letting the artist make money'. The restriction can be based on other-than-financial reasons such as in CleanFlicks v Soderbergh.

US copyright law tends to be more skewed to the financial theory than other countries, but even here it's not the exclusive intent.

..and now what is happening, US copyright law has been pushed onto other nations (with help of WTO).

This one "pushed onto other nations" is a bit qualitative but I think it does ignore that these are accords and that US law also gets modified by other countries pushes - France, for instance, is a major driver
Automatic conference of copyright without need for formality was imposed on USA, moral rights are from civil
Code:
 countries, not common law countries.
Copyright itself predates the USA and other countries an actually have more restrictive rights (such as right of withdrawal) and some countries have loner terms than USA

[b]No matter what the big corporations do, they cannot stop piracy, they can only criminalise it.[/b]

Much of copyright law is civil, not criminal (in USA and other countries there is criminal infringement, but there are varying reasons and thresholds that need to be met for it to be criminal..the cases we typically hear about are civil suits.  The people in "Rip!" who were shown saying "I'm a copyright criminal" weren't - they were subject to civil action, not criminal)
 
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it's always good to have a lawyer around when you need him. :)

The thing is, I don't know if someone said this but downloading is not illegal.You can go to the library for media, borrow your friends CDS, or download from pirate torrents all you want. It is the distribution of the copyrighted material that is illegal.

So my understanding is that if you copy a CD or DVD for a friends and give it to him, it is illegal. If you borrow that CD for yourself and copy it it is not. I think this falls under the last bold that it is a civil and not criminal act. it is criminal for me to copy a CD for you but what is any one going to do, sue me for 30 bucks.
 
The thing is, I don't know if someone said this but downloading is not illegal.You can go to the library for media, borrow your friends CDS, or download from pirate torrents all you want. It is the distribution of the copyrighted material that is illegal.

well, "downloading" - the act of transferring data from a server to a client isn't illegal - one can download with authorization (when you shop at amazon or itunes you download, but it is authorized).


but "downloading" infringing material is -- this was clarified in A&M v Napster.
unauthorized "uploading" violates the right of (control of) distribution 17USC106(3)
and unauthorized "downloading" violates the right of (control of) reproduction 17USC106(1)

BMG v Gonzalez was a case only concerned with unauthorized "downloading"


So my understanding is that if you copy a CD or DVD for a friends and give it to him, it is illegal. If you borrow that CD for yourself and copy it it is not. I think this falls under the last bold that it is a civil and not criminal act. it is criminal for me to copy a CD for you but what is any one going to do, sue me for 30 bucks.

One point we may need to clarify here - "criminal" and "illegal" are not fully synonymous

Civil and Criminal law are different areas of law (who the plaintiff actually is, what standards of proof need to be met, what remedies/penalties the court can impose, etc are different)

a civil wrong (such as a tort) is still unlawful, but it is a private individuals, not the state that have standing
In a criminal situation, the public - generally, 'the state' or 'the people' have standing

An isolated single copy of a CD is probably not going to be criminal, depending on some factors ( In USA, the parameters for criminal infringement is defined in 17USC506) but civil in nature
do keep in mind, while the retail value of the CD may be $30, both civil and criminal judgments can far exceed that.
 
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very nice posts. are you studying/practicing law personally or simply interested? it is a very good thing to get interested in.
 
Hello everyone. I am writing to check in with the population of drummers here to see how you feel about pirating of music and all other forms of art.
I would like to hear specifically from younger cats who grew up with computers an the Internet. As you may or may not know, this problem is bankrupting the industry.
Now... I am totally against record companies and I hope the major
labels due as soon as possible for continuing to polllute the world with tripe. Haha
But ... This problem hurts independents artists more then it does huge corporations.
I can't tell you how many of my friends are deciding against releasing any more material until this problem is worked out. It's really out of control now.

Here us a personal example if I may.
My DVD Afro Cuban drumming has apparently stolen / downloaded from torrents over 45,000 times. This is ... Very disturbing and extremely sad for
me since the thing cost a small fortune to produce. Not to mention the 11 months it took to finish. It was tons and tons of work.
So I have a series of questions which I hope someone can answer and I hope that we can exchange ideas here about this. IMHO we need to solve this together because one day you will be in the position I am in.


Do you think all music and instructional material should be free?
Do you download music from iTunes?
Do you know about and use torrents?
Do you think movies should be free?
Also, does anyone see positive solutions for the future?
Does any one know of technology that prevents torrent sharing?
Do you project yourself into the future and put yourself in the position of artists now?
Or do you consider it a compliment if someone downloads your material.


Lots of questions but... There are many issues we have here and if we are not the pioneers on this ...no one will do anything.

I look forward to all thoughts.

Hi Phil!

I have a gun to my head on a project and have limited time to talk about this right now but I wanted to comment on this and will be glad to revisit it. I will warn you, however, that sarcasm is my second language.

I use Itunes and pay for every song that I buy off of it. This is useful when I have a band hire me out for a month and the songlist has Donna Summer, Ohio Players and one song from other artists on the list. No disrespect to Donna Summer, but I am not a fan and my resources are limited and therefore, I can't justify buying "The Best of Donna Summer" cd just so that I can listen to one song. I don’t mind paying for one song that I need to learn and 99 cents is about right for the song “I’m Coming Out” or “Fire”. It is just more cost effective than $14.99.

As a drummer who has both a DVD and a video podcast avaible for purchase, I went to some expense out of my own pocket to produce and I should rightfully expect to see some ROI (Return on Investment) for my efforts, just like you should!

As a patent holder, inventor and entrepreneur, I also expect to see ROI on my retroplates, just like DW, Zildjian, Vic Firth and any other product manufacturer should expect to make a profit. And there’s the dirty word – profit.

Funny, I also expect to get paid for my time as a teacher teaching private drum lessons. I have built a good career in drumming and have played for some legends.

No, movies shouldn’t be free either. And yes, I am aware of torrent.

I have three books, which I am about to publish and they will be available only in analog form (this means delivered to your mailbox, printed on paper) due to the fact that, if people have begun to develop such a high sense of self-entitlement, I must put my own effort into policing my intellectual property. This means that, yes, someone could pirate my work, but given the current level of laziness of such people, any effort more than a mouse click will be too much effort for them to go to.

Is the music industry to blame for all of this? I don’t think so and I know that this will make me the villain here on DW, but it is a free country or used to be anyway.

Some said that sharing is a way to sample the music. This is incredibly shortsighted and not true. Radio used to be the way the consumer “sampled” music and then decided if he or she like the song enough to buy it in order be able to listen to it anytime they wish. Barnes and Noble, Borders, the internet, Myspace and the like have all made it possible for consumers to sample music, even that of unknown artists. They can now decide if the song is worth purchasing or not – but why don’t they? I will come back to this in a moment.

Now, here is where what I am going to say that will ake me the villain. It may come as a surprise to many of us here on DW, musicians and drummers alike but the vast majority of the public doesn’t play a musical instrument and cannot truly appreciate the work we put into our craft. And even more shocking, they don’t have time to because they are concerned with paying the mortgage and trying to put braces on one child and putting another through college. By the way, college (which seems to have become an entitlement) is an investment which we seek a return on, but I digress. This is where the much-maligned “Pop music” and the Music Business get whipped up on. Have you ever noticed that the word BUSINESS is bigger than the word MUSIC?

Because the population at large hasn’t developed an ear for the drummer going off into Hip-hop/funk/ gospel/R&B/jazz/fusion/serbo-croatian/21 against 5 land, this means that they listen to music that is simple and what they can relate to and they seek it out and buy it (or used to). This is why it is called POP MUSIC – short for the word POPULAR.

And now I will delve into the word of guitarland but not for very long because it makes my head hurt and lowers my IQ. One name – Warren Cuccurulo. What DW? You have never heard of him? Why some of his band mates are guys you have heard of – Terry Bozzio, Vinnie Colaiua, Ed Mann! Yep, Warren played in Frank Zappa’s band. He and Terry had a band called Missing Persons – they had hit songs (those sellouts! How dare they try to put food on the table!). Missing Persons eventually went by the wayside and broke up. Warren went looking for a good steady gig when Andy Taylor of Duran Duran made the ill-fated mistake of venturing out on his own solo career and hired Terry Bozzio to play drums for him. Warren called up Duran (x2) and told them that he was available for their upcoming tour. After checking that Andy was really intent on torpedoing his career, they hired Warren on. Warren played for Duran for about 6 or seven years (not sure of how long). Then in about 1995, after playing the song “The Reflex” more times than humanly possible warren joined up with some former band mates like Vinnie Colauita and proceeded to record and subsequently release the CD “Thanks to Frank” in a very frugal package of cardboard. The Modern Drummer review of this disc put is bluntly “If Vinnie’s playing hasn’t scared you in sometime, buy this CD”. Warren put out the musical equivalent of Aliens, Predator and the Terminator on one disc. This disc was never meant to be POP MUSIC; it was meant to satisfy Warren’s creative side, which had been developing while paying his dues, by satisfying the masses by playing such tripe songs like “Planet Earth” and “Girls on Film”. In short (for those of you still awake), Warren paid for this project by paying his dues (which seem to never be paid in full) by playing in a commercially (a word which conatates commerce and thus money) viable band.

Okay, I am back from guitar land and have an IV and am resting comfortably while I regain my intelligence and a decent sense of humility.

Phil, I think that the problem lies with a generation which has been taught by its parents that they are entitled to have everything they set eyes on and do so like a plague of locusts, devouring and destroying everything they touch. It always amuses me when I have a student cry about having to pay me for lesson time but then turn around and ask me “How do you get paid for playing music?” or “How do you make a living from playing the drums?”

I think it also lies with the “Rockstar” mentality which has invaded so many areas of the world. The same student honestly believes that he only needs two drum lessons (if that many) and a DW/Zildjian endorsement to sound good. This same student is always spouting off about how much everyone else sucks. He decries anyone who makes money in a commercial way as an automatic sellout and doesn’t understand why he can’t get the masses to pack his show at Knott’s Berry farm (admission is free there) to listen to him get off playing in odd time signatures. He desperately wants “someone to make him a ROCKSTAR” and doesn’t realize that those days are long gone and that the responsibility of his success rests on his shoulders alone. He doesn’t realize that there are talented drummers everywhere like Paul Bowman in Corpus Christi, Texas or Enid, Oklahoma which where a great drummer by the name of Dave Anderson is from or Bethel acres which is where Jame Keys is from. Or Iowa, which is where John Robinson is from…or South Dakota or Minnesota or Wisconsin.

I think, Phil, that it is a combination of the underlying symptoms of a lack of respect for hard work which you (or any other artist) put in, a complete indifference and lack of caring as to how money works and nothing but pure jealousy in some instances.

I refuse to lay the blame on the conspiracy theory of the Music Business, the Machine” or the record labels. Even if these were to exist, how does the artist cope with them and deal with them effectively in order to get what said artist wants out of life. This is why I used Warren Cuccurullo as an example. He eventually got what he wanted. Neil Peart once said in an MD interview that there “were no failures in talent; only failures in character.” And he may have been quoting some else at that.

Sheer determination alone is omnipotent.

So Phil, yes you have the right to expect compensation for shelling out a small fortune you dispensed out of your own pocket to make your DVD. Many people simply go to a job, put their time in and expect to get a check, never realizing where the money in that check comes from. It comes from customers buying products or services, both of which you have dutiflied rendered to them.

Yes- I can be a windbag!


Mike

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